Dark Reality

Lee Garth watched, his eyes following the pencil. Cold winds seemed to blow on him. They blew colder each time he realized he was not dictating what the pencil was writing. He watched the factors appear on the paper. There was a meaning in those symbols, a meaning and a purpose stretching across the long, long gulfs of time, reaching from the amoeba, in the protoplasmic slime of steaming seas that are long gone, forward to the creature that shall emerge in some other era, in some century of the far future.

Through him the meaning ran, through Lee Garth, who was 37 years old in 1940.

The far-flung southern horn of the Saracen crescent, sweeping northward in its history changing flight, found the field in France where Charles Martel--Charles the Hammer--waited. With keen sword, and long lance, and hissing arrow, all day long the armies battled, and when the night came on, the Saracen host, smashed and bleeding under the blows of the Hammer, reeled backward, fled back out of France. To the Saracens, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, was the backward turning road. The glowing sun of Islam flickered, and never again burned so brightly. There was a shift in history, and another world evolved because of Charles Martel.

There is a field in France called Tours.

Lee Garth mopped the perspiration from his forehead. He stopped writing for a moment, pushed back his thinning hair, pulled a cigarette from the package on his desk, struck a match. The smoke was blue and indistinct in that shadowed room. Far off, from another world it seemed, there came the raucous hoot of an automobile horn. Somebody going home, or going to work, or going somewhere but probably going home, since the hour was so late. Didn't matter.

There was a gadfly buzzing in his brain.

Again the pencil raced over the paper.

Jan Lippershey's children played in his yard, and now and again, when he would let them, they played in the shop where he worked. They liked to play with the things he made. Lenses, convex and concave. The children played with the lenses, and the telescope was born. Now men could see farther.

That happened in Holland, early in the 1600s.

Perhaps it was more important than Thermopylae or Tours.

Men looked at the stars. World on world on world--world without end--as far as the first telescope showed, the dance of the suns went on. Men made bigger lenses. Beyond those limits the suns were to be found. Did space go on forever? Bigger lenses, bigger lenses.

But still men could not see into tomorrow. It was a formless void of unreality and no instrument could penetrate it. Men had to go blindly into tomorrow, fearing, hesitating, drawing back, until they were kicked there by relentless time.

In 1940 men worked on a lens 200 inches in diameter.

In 1940, all through a sleepless night, Lee Garth watched his racing pencil write factor after factor, watched the equations grow from page to page. Still the pencil raced. He watched it.

He did not think of Leonidas, who had withstood Xerxes, or of Charles Martel, or of Jan Lippershey, or any of the thousands of others who have warped the course of human destiny--Kepler, Newton, Watt, Einstein, Galileo, Copernicus, the little corporal who went down to Saint Helena. He did not even think of Lee Garth. For that night Lee Garth did not matter to himself. Nor ever again.

The dawn came in through the windows of the old house where he worked. Softly, quietly, silently, the night went and the day came. Another tomorrow became today, another dark reality lifted out of the formless void of the future.

George McNeil, Scot production foreman in charge of the cable manufacturing department on United Electric's vast plant, stared at the order that had come down to him. His face a wrinkled frown, he studied the blue prints.

"Those domned monkeys with their domned slip-sticks," he grunted, referring to the drafting department, "have made another mistake."

Specification sheets in hands, he stalked out of his cubby-hole and headed for the office of the production manager.

The production manager examined the specifications. He called the head of the drafting department on the office phone and got a short answer for his trouble.

"The specifications are right," he said testily to McNeil. "Go ahead and fabricate them."

"I can build the domned things," McNeil retorted. "But I'll sweat in hell if I see any use for them. Solid copper bus-bars twenty-four inches in diameter! We don't build a generator--and neither does anybody else in the world--that needs such cables to carry the current it produces."

"They're just part of a big order that came down from the front office marked 'Rush'," the production manager answered. "But they do seem out of reason--" His forehead wrinkled into a frown. He hesitated. "But an order is an order. Build them. What the customer wants with them is his business."

When McNeil left the office the production manager was still frowning. Twenty-four inch cables--. He scratched his head, as if to stir to life a sluggish idea. Then he got up, walked through the plant, up to the general offices, and the girl in the beautifully finished reception room said Mr. Tompkins would see him in a minute.

"The point I make is this," the production manager said to Mr. Tompkins, "if anybody is building a generator that requires cables of that size, we had better know about that generator."

Tompkins didn't show any emotion. He was a heavy man, not from fat but from muscle. Strength. He had to have strength to hold down his job as general manager. His eyes narrowed slightly and a tiny glow appeared in them.

"A fellow by the name of Garth placed that order," Tompkins said. "Garth? Garth? Where have I heard that name before? Umph!" He remembered the presence of his subordinate. "Thank you. You may go."

The production manager went.

Tompkins flicked a switch on his desk. "Call Railton."

He went on thinking. His eyes narrowed to slits and the glow deepened.

Railton came. "You called me?" he asked. He was a slickie, a front man. College, teck school. Knew all about electricity, and what made the wheels go round. Knew how to talk it. Well dressed, smart.

"Go call on Lee Garth," Tompkins said. "You will find his address in the files. Ask him if he will accept a ten day extension on the delivery date of certain items of his order. That is your excuse for getting in to see him."

"Lee Garth? He's a big shot theoretical physicist," Railton said. "Worth a mint. Made his money on a bunch of inventions. The papers call him another Einstein, but I personally think they over-rate him. What has he been ordering from us and what am I to find out?"

"Find out why he needs solid copper bus-bars twenty-four inches in diameter, but don't let him find out that's what you want to know."